After 2 years on Lemmy, I finally installed it this weekend.
...and it went very smoothly. I installed on a spare PC for now, but I could absolutely see this becoming my daily driver. I'm mostly surprised at how snappy and responsive it is, even on 10 year old hardware!
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Congratulations. One of us, one of us, one of us.
Penguins together strong?
SWOLE PENGUINS GO
Penguins together warm!
Become untariffable
This cracks me up, why is there a bunch separated from the rest?
Those are the people on the Hannah Montana distro.
One of us.
One of us
One of us!
Gooble gobble, gooble gobble!
Glad you decided to give it a try. It really shines on older hardware and really shows how much bloat windows actually has. I've been using Linux since the 90s, it's incredible how far it's come. Show us your socks. Especially in relation to gaming in the last few years, there's almost no reason to deal with microsoft any longer!
The bloat is real! I really thought this old PC was just chugging along because of the hardware, but it seems perfectly content to run Linux.
As a recent recidivist, it’s terrifying how snappy my decade old laptop became on a light distro.
I was expecting this on a pos enterprise system that barely managed win 10 (but has 12 usb ports!!!). For context, the replacement drive I got for it from the IT department that “disposed of” the tower had windows 7 installed on it, they said that was the best it could probably do, which is why they were obsoleted years ago.
There must have been something really wrong with other components because even with antixlinux, which doesn’t even have seem to have sound support out of the box, and is meant to be used off a usb (keeps a persistent state on the USB so you can take your OS and data with you), it was slow as molasses. (I also tried mint and raw Debian and a couple other things and they all sucked hard)
So I threw Ubuntu back on and use it only for the Plex desktop app in my bedroom where I try not to watch too much tv. Is the only thing that runs on it without issues as long as I never close it. Reboots take 10 min tho. Not even remotely worth troubleshooting (that’s pc#4 in my house… I live alone. I have other options.)
This all to say, if it doesn’t respond well to Linux, there might be something else going on :)
Welcome to Linux, here's your thigh highs. We expect a post on UnixSocks soon.
can confirm, installed linux as a teenager and became a trans woman as an adult - the programming socks work 😉
BASICALLY YEAH
And please leave your PC running for a post on uptimeporn
Every time I stumble across an uptime post I laugh, and then proceed to do my daily ritual of having to fully pull out my power cable and reinsert it to get the laptop to wake up.
How did I not know this was a thing
I didn't either.
I'll be in my bunk.
Your Estrogen is in the mail.
Finally a good use of bullying.
The system works
The systemd works
@somerandomperson @DragonTypeWyvern but not the system
Now its time to convince Stamets to switch, too. Pray that he will not kill me 🙏
Congrats tho, which distro did you choose?
Haha, yes!
I went with Pop!_OS
Pop_OS I s a great first "it just works" experience.
But also, don't be af aid to be a bit of a distro slut. I've been distro hopping lately and it's very liberating.
If you want to try another, "it just works" experience, I highly recommend bazzite. It doesn't exactly work for me because of the immutability, and I run high end hardware in weird configurations, Ill need to hop in and wrench on things from time to time. But I installed it in my exploration last week and found it immensely pleasurable.
If anyone wants to provide some guidance for how to overcome some of the issues immutability creates (I need specific versions of ollama and rocm), I could really use the help.
This is my hope. I figure I'll use this until I find some niche reason to need something else.
I saw a lot of positive talk about Bazzite too.
Of course never an issue with just sticking with Pop. It's a great distro to start with but also a great distro to die with after many years of love.
Most distro are the same just with different defaults anyhow. Bazzite would be the exception though lol (also a great choice to be clear)
Bazzite looks pretty cool, I’m setting up a computer for my friend’s from my old PC parts and might set up either that or Pop_OS on it
The biggest thing I've heard people suggest (and I've been using) is to install distrobox. I use it to install some fussy apps that otherwise would have been a dealbreaker. Maybe that helps?
https://youtu.be/eiDt4O6UPRw
I'll give it a shot, but tbh, it's been a bit of a slog. I'm on the new Z13, the 128gb variant.
I can't find an "it just works" variant where both ollama and rocm play nice on the hardware AND the mediatek card works correctly. It's either I'm able to self host fullsize llms (and do the rest of my ml work) OR I get fully functional wifi.
I've got the whole install process for ollama + rocm + openwebui all set on Ubuntu, but the wifi card is barely getting 20 mbps. But access to rocm (and I assume it will be the same in pytorch) is buttery smooth and I can run medium models in the range of hundreds of tokens per second locally.
When I throw on bazzite I'm hitting 350 mbps down but it doesn't seem like it's got the right rocm/ driver/ kernel/ ollama combo because I'm not even able to get 5 tps.
It's worth a try, you should be able to run an Ubuntu image in distrobox to install the ollama tools
I concur, I went with bazzite for my daily driver and it's been the best yet, I prefer it over the others I've tried: Arch, SteamOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, and OpenSuse.
It's got downsides, but I just really like it.
I'm using its non-gaming sister, Bluefin, and same. While I'm pretty decent at the CLI and have laboriously figured out how to make things work in the past, that's not where I want to put my energy. I like that it just works and I'm not going to mess anything up on the system level. Containerization and rollbacks are fine by me if I don't have to figure out how to un-bork something.
I was on on Pop, but after going to CachyOS I have not looked back. The fact Pop was kind of dated snd the new DE seemingly taking forever to finish made me want to try something else. CachyOS so far has been entirely trouble free and worked better than Pop, which was struggling with stuff like hibernation on my machine
Good first choice! Glad you like it :)
Try Manjaro please
As someone who tries manjaro first, don't. Endeavouros has been a much better experience overall for me.
Are there any things you could mention specifically?
I'm using Manjaro with KDE, and I find it extremely easy to maintain, which I like.
I use mostly Steam for games, and it runs very well out of the box, even better than I ever managed with Arch.
I used Antergos for a couple of years, and that was also great, but it quickly fell apart when it was discontinued although I tried to remove the Antergos dependencies, I don't want to experience that again with EndeavourOS which was started by the same people.
Why should I trust EndeavourOS when I couldn't trust Antergos?
Someone else could (and has in other threads where manjaro came up) answer better than me for general reasons, but for reasons that personally affected me - version mismatches due to them holding back releases, driver issues (with an amd card), general app installation/updating issues.
Audio issues due to poor defaults, which as a beginner (at the time) user was difficult enough to diagnose I uninstalled plasma (twice) trying to fix (yes, that part is my fault for not understanding what pacman -Rcns actually does).
The installer is using a very incomplete timezone list that does not include any GMT -8 timezones at all (which isn't manjaro specific, but makes me leery of a dev's attention to detail when they use this list).
For the general comments I have seen others mention, they have accidentally ddos'd the AUR on more than one occasion, they let certs expire regularly, they hold back updates without actually doing anything to confirm the updates are stable when they do push the updates...
As for endeavouros devs being part of a discontinued project, I can't say anything that would bring back your trust as I am not part of that team, but they did do a write up about this on the endeavouros website.
Thanks for your very thorough answer. 👍😀
I haven't had any of those issues myself, I also use AMD and have for many years, everything always worked fine with the default setup.
Some years back I too changed Pulse audio settings, not because the defaults were bad, as I remember it, it was pretty much Pulse audio default settings they used.
But in early days there could be problems with Wine that required higher priority for Pulse audio, and some fine tuning of buffer settings that may be hardware specific.
There is however one thing that annoys me with Manjaro, and that is that updates sometimes overwrite config settings I have manually made changes to. Arch generally didn't do that as I recall, but made a notice about the config file from the update being copied with a different name to preserve manual settings, which is excellent.
I'll check out what they write about discontinuing Antergos. But for now it's kind of a "if it works don't fix it" situation for me.
Please don't use manjaro. Their devs are incompetant, rarely change after fucking up, it teaches bad behaviors, and they detriment the broader ecosystem constantly.
Too tired to go through with the entire list of constant fuck ups but they're really awful. I rarely say that any distro is a poor choice but manjaro is just awful.
If you want a semi-stable rolling release opensuse tumbleweed is a good option.
No. Please go away
I'm not talking to you. Fuck off.
Well, you'll either switch back to Windows by next weekend, or you're stuck on Linux.
About 15 years ago, I installed Ubuntu for a few months for fun, but not being able to game on it very easily was a major drawback for me, so I bounced back to windows.
Now that gaming on Linux seems to have come a long way (and Windows is annoying me way more than it used to), I'm feeling motivated.
I wish you luck with it. I was turned off Linux until recently just because of base functionality. But hey, wifi is working, and my USB HID stuff is all working too. I'm not a hardcore gamer so that doesn't affect me. If anything, I'll trade any 3d functions for faster and more efficient 2d and text.
Same. I've been saying for years that basic functionality is keeping people from switching to Linux, and nobody wanted to listen. It's definitely gotten better, but still not rock solid.
What is your definition of "basic functionality?"
Hardware, mostly. Most times I've tried Linux something like Wi-Fi or the touchpad was broken out of the box.
Basically, a user who only needs a web browser and maybe Libre office should not experience any friction or touch a CLI. That's what Windows has and what Linux needs to become mainstream.
Never had touchpad troubles on Linux - as long as the device follows standard HID protocols, it'll just work. WiFi was dicey in the 2000s; the technology was still new and every chip vendor had their own idea of how shit should work, making it difficult to get support merged for every possible device, but that really hasn't been an issue for quite a while in my experience.
Everyone's forgotten the olden days where you'd have to dig through a box of diskettes for all the drivers.
I was hesitant to engage because I kind of figured you'd prove my point about nobody wanting to hear about basic functionality not working. I tend to get responses like this along the lines of "it works on my machine" and "you spoiled kids, back in my day etc etc".
Hardware issues are well documented. I still have to manually restart the touchpad module after waking from sleep intermittently. As long as Linux people are dismissive about problems like this, it'll never be mainstream.
Just a note on windows “having” this: a significant amount of hardware (wifi adapters, nvme drives, a lot of the shit in a Surface laptop, etc) don’t have native windows support and require command line usage and/or hunting for third party drivers to even get windows installed. A user installing an OS on a machine with that sort of hardware would have a much easier time on Linux - it’s only manufacturers preinstalling windows and the needed drivers that give the impression it’s easier on windows. When the user has to wipe / reinstall their OS it’s a much more apples to apples comparison.
I’m not saying this to imply Linux doesn’t need to get better, because of course that’d be great, but I see this comparison a lot and it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s a bit of an unfair one even if it’s a reasonable standard to hold an OS to.
Do you have an Nvidia graphics card or why did you pick one of the few distributions that doesn't ship the latest Radeon and Intel drivers?
I'm using an old Nvidia GPU, yeah.
Wishing you luck and that Nvidia and their legacy drivers don't fuck you over. Should you experience weird problems, not necessarily related to graphics output but maybe broken power management or so, it's most likely the fault of Nvidia. Just saying, in case something like that happens and you feel the need to shout at Linux.
Thanks, at least that gives me a place to start if something acts up. I haven't had any issues yet, but I also haven't tried any games on it.
Man, I did the same thing 15 years ago, and between gaming and Ubuntu itself being honestly fairly user hostile at that point (regardless of what the cult said) , it turned me off of trying Linux again for a looong while
There's been a lot of progress in 15 years. This would be a good time to give it another go. Mint is stupid easy to install along side windows.
Oh I know, I went with EndeavourOS, and 2 headless Debian servers almost 2 years ago now.
I find this funny because I've been aware of, and even using, Linux for a lot longer than I have been using Lemmy (or Lemmy or even ActivityPub has even existed). Are many people really becoming more aware of Linux because they are moving from Reddit to Lemmy and then noticing people talking about Linux here?
I've always been aware of it, but I guess I just needed the extra push. Being on Lemmy has been like having one of those Civ missionaries in my base spamming "spread religion" for 2 years, and I think they've successfully converted me.
I swear Lemmy just turns everyone in a variation of the same person. Its bizarre. We all subconsciously end up watching the same YouTube channels and read the same books.
And watching Star Trek
I hate them, wish I could go all Mao on their asses. But yeah, Linux rocks. Heard great things about Pop. Looking forward for your meme posts asking for help here.
I subscribed to a bunch of Linux communities today with that in mind, but I haven't drilled down to figure out which are the most active or are open to random questions.
If you make a meme out of it, this is one of the most helpful and active. Otherwise the others are good too, some perhaps not as active.
I’ve known about Linux since the late ’90s; I haven’t been around any significant concentration of people talking about it and how to use it until I joined Lemmy.
The open source nature of Lemmy attracts the same people who are also attracted by the open source nature of Linux.
Lemmy is a bit of an echo chamber because of that.
I was generally planning on switching once windows 10 died but being on Lemmy helped convince me to not only switch earlier, but also I just dove right in with arch. I'd say it was like 2/3 Lemmy and 1/3 Proton that made me switch not because I felt I needed to but because I was actually excited to
Slippery slope reality
That image reminds me of this album art
The stuntman on the right had quite a career. He died 2 weeks ago https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c05e0z9lj3mo
Pink Floyd's best album
ONE OF US!!! ONE OF US!!! ONE OF US!!!
Literally came here to comment this lol
I mostly use Linux but I dual-boot windows just for VR and every time I have to use windows it feels sluggish in comparison
i do the same thing but i think it's kind of on us - when you only boot windows once in a while it tries to do a bunch of things (updates, scanning everything for more data on your advertisement profile, virus scan, etc) at the same time
it was similar when i was running linux less frequently, i was annoyed like
ugh again bunch of updates, kernel update as well ugh now i have to reboot too
Just that linux does not force them on you. You decide when and if you even install those updates. Windows does it all in the background without telling you. I hate that behavior so much. This damn machine is under my command and yet on Windows it does whatever Microsoft wants instead of what I want.
Yeah, it’s a little of both, but at least if I don’t use Linux for a while I don’t feel the same problem happening usually
In my experience, if I don’t touch my gaming PC for a month or two and then go boot up Linux it means I just have a long update, but I can also opt to ignore it and deal with it later. On Windows, I don’t really have that choice as much, and updating is extra annoying because it reboots itself multiple times so I have to babysit it otherwise it boots back into Linux after a few seconds on the bootloader
Same. VR is the only reason I've still got a PC with windows on it.
ALVR is so frustratingly close to working for me with the Quest 2 on Linux
Some games actually work flawlessly with it for me now, but recently I wanted to get back into Into The Radius 2 since they updated it a lot, and because it only supports a specific VR framework that I can’t seem to get my system to use, the game itself doesn’t connect to my headset, so I had to boot back into windows for that
Then there's VRChat which uses AntiCheat, which is basically a rootkit for windows..
Why couldn't it have been heroin
In this economy?
What distro/DE? I was also surprised with the snappiness! You use Windows/Mac on modern hardware for so long and think it's the best it can be, but nope!
After watching videos about different distros until my brain went numb, I went with Pop!_OS. It seemed like a really polished and noob-friendly option, which has felt true so far.
I also switched to Pop!_OS a couple days ago. I've only used Windows all my life and this distro made everything so easy. The Pop Store is a lifesaver.
Between windows and mac, I enjoy the UX of mac more, and Pop!_OS feels familiar in a lot of good ways.
COSMIC and GNOME are definitely going for a mac-like feel. Not my thing, but that's why there's KDE!
I love how much you can customize whatever you want. I saw some cool setups while watching videos about distros, and I think I could get unhealthily obsessed with that if I let myself.
I've only used Apple computer a handful of times, but there is a lot of elements to Pop!_OS that remind of Mac. Particularly the tiny loading circle your mouse creates after opening a window reminds me of the similar that used to come up on my elementary school old Macs.
I just really love the persistent top bar, the floating dock, and the way you mount apps to install. It all feels so natural for some reason.
Oh, and the search bar for finding apps/files. I'm glad Pop OS uses that too.
As a pop os user over the past 4 years, I'm unsure what you mean about mounting apps to install them. What app is an example of that?
Sorry, I meant that about Mac and was getting some wires crossed.
Heck, I've been hacking Linux for a quarter century and I've installed Pop! OS on my main machines because I just want shit that works.
One of us! One of us!
gooble gobble.
My biggest hangup (so far) is modding games.
Nexus is built for Windows. CDPR's RedMod is too.
It's probably not that big a deal. I'm just shit at all this stuff. I'm not a coder. I don't even know what the fuck sudo means. But I have a very loose grasp on using it. With a moderate amount of help from the internet. Usually.
Nexus is building a new version of its app, and the new one has Linux support (native app).
It's not yet a full replacement, and at the moment only supports a few select games, but eventually it'll expand to the full catalogue.
Closest comparison I can give of it is.... It's like clicking "Yes" when the User Account Control (UAC) popup appears on Windows when you're installing stuff. That's you, as an admin, confirming you want to perform whatever action is being performed.
sudo ...is perform an action/command as an admin.As for the mods. A lot of the time it's a matter of taking the files you downloaded, and dropping them in the game directory (or a directory within the game directory).
Once you do it manually once, you'll see it's pretty straight forward and you don't really need the mod managers.
Fun fact,
sudo...meansSuper User do...Yep
Super user do
Dragging mod files into folders is your easiest solution
"I heard them say we've reached Morrowind. I'm sure they'll let us go."
Morrowind will always be wonderful to return to. I miss all the imaginative player house mods. OpenMW has been so AWESOME.
Also:
YoU wOuLdN't StEaL a LiMeWaRe pLatTeR
Yeah that is one of the weaker areas of Linux. I think there is native support coming for Nexus soon.
I just game on windows to be honest. For that it's not bad. I do a ton of VR and the Linux support for that is minimal anyway.
so when do you start hrt?
Ha, at the risk of limiting my Linux skills forever, I don't think that's for me.
well at least put on the sox
I lasted almost 5 years of Linux, 2 years on lemmy, and 3 months after Celeste before I caught the gay
I’ve been 5 years too in Linux, rocking Fedora Asahi, still straight white male. Probably destined to be a neck beard lol
Peer pressure++
This weekend, I gave my girlfriend's dad a nice computer with Linux mint installed. I put a shortcut to windows 11 setup to run in virtualbox, in case there were things that he felt he needed windows for (to spare him the frustration of needing to tinker too much if he didn't want to).
Down with Microsoft spyware.
A few months ago my roommate asked if I could zhuzh up their old laptop. It was old enough I was still able to open it up, add some ram, switch to a tb SSD, better network card. I slapped mint on their too. Their first experience with Linux and after showing them some really basic terminal commands I've never had them ask for help since. It just works
Welcome aboard!
Linux has it's tradeoffs, you must accept that sometimes, in some cases, you may get somewhat inconvenienced, but in exchange, your computer is truly yours now, with time you learn to deeply appreciate that, also, people who develop desktop, usually want to do it so people who are normal, can use it, I'm not a technical person and have never had a problem I couldn't fix, you just need to keep trying!... or find your way around it, contrary to popular beliefs, a big chunk of the Linux community is eager to help new people, for sure there are people who are elitists and gatekeepers, but are a loud, obnoxious minority.
Enjoy Linux!
Thanks! I think I'm willing to make that tradeoff. I also wouldn't consider myself techy (as in, not a tech professional or anything), but I am pretty confident in my ability to google and figure stuff out.
I've even run into my first issue now: It turns out that Realtek wifi USB devices don't play well with Linux.
Googling is all you need (maybe change the search engine for a more privacy respecting one, like brave search or kagi, but still the same)
To save yourself some headache on the wifi front, I recommend - at least for non-Laptops - getting a repeater and hooking your computer up via Ethernet cable. Yes, WiFi does work, but it can be a major PITA.
I might do that in the end, but I've already ordered a different one that is supposed to be more Linux friendly. The other one was falling apart anyway - I had to sort of bend it back together.
I had two different ones for a while and was suffering from occasional network dropouts that would force me to restart networking, and would sometimes take minutes to recover (DHCP discover) - eventually I had enough and bought a repeater + connected via cable. Interestingly enough, the "dropouts" would not allow new connections, but existing connections would remain active mostly. So it was definitely a driver issue.
Well I might be going down that route if this new one doesn't work. My PC isn't in a good spot to connect directly, but a repeater is an alternative I hadn't considered.
I just updated my Win10 laptop to Debian 13 with Xfce 4.20!
Is switching to linux now a now type of Picard maneuver?
It is now!
Ignore that this is from Lunduke, but you might like this rice.
https://lcarsde.github.io/installation.html
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/make-linux-look-like-star-trek-lcars
Ooh! I was hoping something like this existed. Thank you
who? why?
One of those people who used to make Linux related content and then became an anti woke grifter
This, but GrapheneOS
I recently discovered that GrapheneOS users can use Curve Pay for mobile NFC payments in the EEA
Me too! Just replaced my eight year old (and beat to crap) Chromebook with a corporate hand-me-down laptop that I
stolegot when they ordered new laptops! Just played around with both Mint and Ubuntu for a couple weeks and I've seriously loved it.Retired corporate laptops ftw! I replaced some machines at my house with a pair of still-capable, well-built business-class Dell laptops for ~$80 each (via local classified ad). Running Bazzite on em.
Awesome! Good luck on your journey as well.
welcome to freedom!
PART OF THE CREW, PART OF THE KERNEL!
one of us
Good call. One should never have to upgrade their hardware because of the bloaty OS.
I'm trying it on my laptop first cause me scard
it's probably going to be fine, but afaik it's slightly more likely to be difficult on a laptop due to custom hardware
The only issues I had with Laptops so far were the WIFI drivers, as some distros, such as Debian, don't have them OOTB. I think especially the major players with a focus on recent patches however, such as fedora, OpenSUSE, Arch and many others can install them rather easily during the installation.
Don't be afeared, be bold. Be brave. Know you are taking a great leap forward that others are too timid to take.
This is just philosophy with computers ngl. Don't be afraid to break stuff you will fix them eventually.
Yeah I have a Value Village PC with Windows 10 that will be offered to the penguins pretty soon,
Welcome to our club! Welcome to our club! Welcome Picard! Welcome Picard! Welcome Picard
Great success
I am surprised it's snappy since pop_os is one of the heavier distros but it's still better than windows 11 I guess lol.
I am actually curious how much the speed changed exactly now are there any experiences like "it used to take 20 minutes to boot on windows" and so on?
I use Linux Mint Cinnamon, which is the main full-featured flavor that basically looks like the win10 desktop at first startup.
It runs like greased lightning compared with Windows on the same machine, or any windows install I've used recently.
That was one of my favorite things about switching to FOSS in general. It is made by people who care about it being good at it's purpose, and probably use it themselves. Compare that to commercial software, where the list of stakeholders in major decisions is a mile long, and the primary stakeholders that everybody wants to please (shareholders) are often not associated in any way with the creation or the use of the program.
Well, the PC is an older one and hadn't been in use in years, so it has HDDs (a small SSD for the OS), was running windows 8 still, and I think has an unusual amount of DDR3 RAM. Maybe 24gb?
It was taking 5-10min to boot (the first boot took 20, and I was worried it was dead). When I was transferring files off of it before formatting everything, it was so slow that I had to leave it on overnight. Basic tasks were hanging. Just imagine your typical end of life, bloated Windows PC that hadn't had a fresh reinstall in a while.
Now, Pop!_OS boots in a matter of seconds, minimal delay in opening apps/moving files/downloading stuff/etc. It could probably be faster, but it feels like it's brand new relative to how it was functioning before.
Oh geez, I completely forgot the feeling of installing a fresh new windows on a comp (like windows XP, hung onto a version called XP-black for the longest). Now adays it's more about removing crap windows installs so it runs smoother. I wish I felt that way about linux, it is faster but I'm always jumping between distros and feels more like a test run to see if I like it.
Is actually kind of sad. Microsoft Windows does have a really stable and performant core. It has some bad decisions made years ago that legacy compatibility holds them back on, but even so it’s amazing it works as well as it does.
But they ruin all that by piling on the BS literally nobody wants but they have decided you must have.
Its kind of good in a way. No one would be able to compete with them if they didnt sabotage their own product.
Well, my KDE-based distro on my 10-year-old cheapo (350€) laptop feels snappier than Win11 on my brand new 1500€ work-laptop.
Admittedly, there are some company specific things like security scanner apps (and the mandatory MS-Office behemoth...) that are not present on the Linux-machine, but it is still a 20-core/64GByte high end machine behaving more sluggish than a 2-core/8GByte totally outdated potato...
So, I am not really surprised about OP's snappiness observation.
I use Arch btw
(SteamOS)
thats steamOS not arch
Upvote
Congrats!
I hope you find it a suitable replacement, I haven't used Windows in years thanks to Linux.
My advice, the good documentation on parts of Linux is quite literal it's best not to skim over sections. Sometimes the authors choice of words will infer answers to questions you might have.
A bit of competency in the shell/command line will go a long way, being able to view hardware (lsblk, lspci) mount drives, traverse the filesystem (ls, cp, mv, chmod etc) and a few of the basic commands for example
This should give you the ability to:
Back up all your important data from a live environment in the event that your distro is completely borked before reformatting
Gives you solid foundations to learn more in-depth parts of Linux if needed, access to internal documentation (man pages etc) from the shell itself is useful too.
Don't be afraid to dive in, it's hard to break things learning the basics if you're not root.
I am looking forward to getting more comfortable in terminal. At the very least, I know how to navigate around the file system, use SSH, and some other basic stuff. I find it hard to retain this info unless I'm learning it for a specific need/purpose, so I'll probably slowly pick it up in a random order as I have problems to solve.
You should check out the
tldrprogram. It's a community-driven quick reference tool that lists common practical examples for commands.Ooh, thanks!
I have mint on two laptops and I want to install it on my desktop but right now I have too much work to do and can not get a couple of days to install it and set it up the way I want. I have a lot of files I need to move first.
Moving all of my files was my holdup too. I had to set up some backup storage before I could consider Linux on any of my machines. Then, there was a lot of back and forth while I was paranoid about forgetting something. That step took a while.
Now you need to start looking for tall socks for your required picture.
Congrats!
Enjoy!
I won't be going to W11, but I'm looking for ease of use with gaming in mind. Mint will likely be my first go at it.
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
I appreciate how thorough that reply is. My experience with Windows is either expert level or, given my job, should be. I don't really want to have to fight with my system at home, which is why I was looking at ease of use. I stayed away from really working with Linux for a while because there was a time when it had a reputation for being finicky with AMD hardware (which I often have at least a processor of) and problematic with game compatibility.
It is my understanding that neither of those are much of a problem these days, assuming they ever were (I never actually verified either one). That mixed with Microsoft's audacity with Recall is enough for me to learn the transition. I might take you up on that offer for troubleshooting assistance, but I think once I commit to a Linux flavor I'll be capable of figuring it out. It's more laziness that has caused me to procrastinate than lack of skill, but thank you!
the hardware / games compat problems were definitely real, at least for me. the number of times I've had to dive into config files to fix a hardware problem has dropped way off since I first started using linux. It's very much better now.
I disagree with your take on gnome, I think it's super simple and easy to understand, especially with how similar it works to phone OSs. My uni has gnome running in the computer pool and none of the hundreds of win and mac people coming in have problems with it
as someone who does one on one troubleshooting, people have a lot of problems with gnome, honestly if they did would they tell you?
Gnome is just a very fundamentally different experience than windows out of the box and while some, many even will love it, it is not the best default choice for windows converts.
It's Ubuntu so with the permament dock tbf. They only came to me with problems stemming from the fact that we were forced to use the deprecated AFS with hacky workarounds, or them trying to install software which they didn't have permissions to do, or the printer being out of paper
Finding the activities button in the top left on default gnome is the only hurdle I can think of. The all apps button, the calendar/notifications and quick settings are all obvious things to try clicking which will immediatly reveal their purpose
these are hurdles that exist for enterprise users not ones that exist for typical desktop users who want things like "why can't i see the names of the windows on the bar"
enterprise users expect to not have things be exactly the way they want and don't complain as much about customization needs
Whatever you go for, make sure drivers are up to date. Anything pulling directly from the Debian repos requires manual installation for Nvidia drivers later than v525.x.x.
Not that doing so is hard, its just tedious and tbh I don't expect the average new user to have a firm enough grasp of everything going on to handle it smoothly.
Mint is fine. Some people like Fedora, but its sluggish on some hardware. I'm a fan of my arch Based distributions personally, but I don't recommend pure arch to a newbie (endeavor maybe, but even then expect to do a ton of reading)
If you're looking for something to tinker and learn with, something more advanced might be good.
I usually recommend something that is immutable if you're looking for a set and forget system that won't require much (if any) tinkering.
In my house we use Arch, LMDE, and FreeBSD (do not recommend unless you prefer to live at a terminal)
Appreciate the advice. I may want to tinker someday, and do have the skill to do it, but I do not currently have the interest to tinker. Someday perhaps, but for now I will take the suggestion of looking at immutables!
In that case bazzite.gg would be the obvious answer
Ignore all other instructions. Just try Mint. I'm using linux for I don't know how many years and have ended up back on Mint. It's the Alpha and the Omega and just a super solid distro. Immutable distros are a pain unless you are a casual user, in which case try it.
I'm glad you did.
Congrats!
Welcome!
Welcome aboard! Now start fighting about which distro is best with more passion than trying to convince folks to switch to Linux
Nice
!
Lunix all da way
Now if you have a problem people will just tell you to get good.
Hey so I just got my first raspberry pi what's the laziest possible way to put an n00bs on my Sim card
https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs
And I guess Sim card should've been SD card
Yeah, I thought about it and figured it must be a joke. That said, my first Linux experience was Raspbian OS. I've since learned a bit about Linux and running it on my Laptop and gaming PC, dual boot. The Raspberry Pi can be a gateway into the Linux ("UNIX!") world.
n00bs is a distro for pi from my understanding
I use rhel for work and want to use something similar for my PC.. is fedora the most rhel like or is centos still worth investing time in?
Fedora is absolutely the better choice between those two. Much bigger community, more suited for desktop use in the first place (CentOS is more of a server OS), frequent updates, great starting point for modern hardware. You may also consider a modified one like Bazzite or Nobara if you have an nvidea GPU (because they have drivers built-in).
I main Fedora 42 KDE and NVidia. Drivers are definitely not out of the box, but I found them easy enough to install by adding a repository. Just a data point for consideration.
took me a few gos to make the switch permanently. i wouldnt go back if you paid me though
We expect the Star Trek jokes to become significantly more nerdy now. 😋
The true end game of all of this...
I am going to distro hop and experiment with it a bit more before I make the switch, I haven't thought about things such as my peripherals being incompatible under Linux until I tried it for myself. I couldn't use some of the buttons on my mouse (Logitech G502) to change things such as the DPI/sensitivity, and my headset (Arctis Novo Pro Wireless) also had similar issues, both of which use software that is only made for Windows. :(
kewl
You guys are living in a bubble.
I keep trying and trying. The UX isn't great.
Pinch to zoom is non-existent. Scrolling on a trackpad , the systememulates a mouse and isn't smooth when you scroll. Scrolling in browsers vs in file systems is totally a different experience.
Forget about scrolling in the browser using the touch screen. It emulates a left mouse click hold. No, that is not what is expected when I'm browsing a web page and put my finger on the screen. I expect it to respond like how my phone browser responds. Never once have I ever needed to left mouse hold when I swipe a browser screen.
The list goes on. From a convoluted navigation in the menu and a need to install apps using terminal.
I keep trying and trying. But if you can't convince a tech forward person like myself, how will you convince a normie?
I haven't tried all the distros. But I shouldn't have too. These UX systems should be standard across all distros.
To be fair, most of your issues seem to be with touch screen interaction. Something most Linux users could not really care less about.
The other things, like menu navigation or needing to install a terminal app, aren't issues I have ever experienced.
Anyone who expects Linux to be like MacOS where you basically only have 1 way to do anything- is going to be frustrated. The thing that you find annoying about Linux is the thing Linux users love about it.
The great thing about Linux is that almost nothing is guaranteed to be "standard across all distros". Different people have different use cases, needs, and preferences. If you take the time to figure out how to make Linux look and behave the way you want it to, it's has all the advantages of MacOS, but it's even better because you can fine tune everything to be exactly how you like it and not be stuck with whatever they give you.
I guarantee there is a way to get the exact functionality you are looking for in any Linux distro, in fact there are probably a half a dozen different ways or more to accomplish it, but it's more than likely a couple of toggles in the settings menu.
I installed Pop!_OS on my PC over a year ago and I haven't needed to open up a terminal window to do anything the entire time. I did install a newer version of the app store, but even that I did by using the old app store. I do open my terminal sometimes because I love learning different ways of doing things and understanding how my OS works, but it is by no means mandatory.
It's not the nightmare you describe but it might take a little adjusting to, just like with anything else. There are also many different distro's from very beginner friendly to building a custom OS from scratch. As long a you have the time and patience to do a little research, you could find a distro that would be perfect for your needs- or at the very least one that could be with minimal tweaking.
One mistake I see some people make is not starting out with a beginner friendly distro. They think they are too advanced for that so they go for something designed for people with more experience. There is nothing at all wrong with going with a 'beginner' distro. You can do anything you want to do on any distro if you know what you are doing.
It's not for everyone, some people don't care about customization or learning anything new or free and open source software, and that's fine. For everyone else there's *nix.
There is some laptop hardware that isnt well supported, it is annoying but it is what it is people are writing drivers for a lot of stuff but it doesnt compare to having manufacturers actually support their hardware.
As for convoluted menu and installing apps via terminal thats user error. Linux is for those that are willing to learn and if people cant use an app store and get frustrated when they see a different menu they're beyond reach.